Walkability in rich countries is expensive precisely because lots of people want walkability, and that want is underserved. It's signal that we should allow more of it to happen!
Walkability is expensive because density. Walkability = density. And density means that real estate is small and there is a competition to get it. A walkable place just can't be big to stay walkable, and it has to include a lot of things to still be liveable.
A suburbia can cover entire continent easily and stay cheap because land, on the scale needed for private houses, is almost free. It just doesn't work this way with liveable cities that have to be small, and quickly lose attractiveness as you move away from the very core which is normally only a few hundred meters in radius.
European cities look nice for a tourist but people living in "nice" parts of them are living there either because their ancestors bought their apartments pre-WWI, or because of one-off luck, or because they are rich. Vast majority still lives in the outskirts that look a lot more like Soviet Union than "Europe" the way Americans see it.
We've also shot ourselves in the foot with land-use policy in SF/Silicon Valley. When engineers build products at a company that succeeds, the gains end up accruing to landlords.
It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family.
Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail.
My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.
I loved this essay when it came out, and I still think it's pretty great. But I'm forced to acknowledge that a big reason I was on board with it is that the identities I was given to choose from when I was young didn't appeal to me.
And I'm forced to acknowledge that for most people, their identities do work and make them happy in ways I can only sort-of understand. And maybe they lower our society's level of epistemic virtue, but people may never let them go, and it's not obvious that we ought to try to convince them to beyond a certain point.
"I could answer by saying that, in many circumstances, identity really is necessary for hedonic well-being. [...] the world isn’t set up to provide us with constant sources of utility, so it’s much better to have a constantly-accessible utility generator inside yourself, even if that generator requires some finicky maintenance."
If you go to a city council meeting on the peninsula, 80% of the residents speaking say things like this. In my experience, even most tech workers speaking are the ones who bought property in the 90's and want to lift the drawbridge now that they've got theirs.
The sentiment that the Bay Area can't allow more homes to be built offends me, and it hurts even more that people who feel this way are the vast majority of voices that reach city councils, and that they're far more organized during elections.
In this case, it's appropriate. Palantir doesn't "collect health and financial data on people", and I've never seen anything in the press that suggests they do.
Well, how do you do health care insurance fraud detection without data when your expertise is big data? they might technically just create and manage collection and storage tools for others, but the end goal is that grandpa can't get his cancer treatment reimbursed thanks to data that has been collected on him with the help of Palantir.
Sure. Palantir, like other successful enterprise software companies, has a variety of large, enterprisey customers. But saying that Palantir collects health and financial data on people sounds super scary, when in fact Palantir isn't in the data collection business in the first place.
It's not really though. The "citation please" is usually the first punch in a one-two of cite/attack-source. Palantir analyzes, yes, not collect. But what is done with that data is not exactly innocent either.
"Citation please" is a gentle reminder - that pops up whenever someone spouts some unfounded or unverifiable opinion - for people doing so in future to please save us all time and give a source upfront. And from what I've seen, it is usually only applied to comments that can't be backed up.
Maybe that was a kneejerk on my part. There are times its useful, and in the cold decontextualized space of "online" it can be hard to read. I just want to note it's also used as a kind of attack, often on things that, as the poster I was attempting to support noted, could be discovered with literally the time it takes to open another browser tab.
you know that precise documentation of the exact role of Palantir in the drone attacks could lead you to jail? Palantir works in Yemen, works with all the agencies involved in drone attacks, has the perfect tools to find a phone to lock a hellfire on according to the quite lax US definition of "terrorist", and is always bragging about its role in the US wars abroad. So yes, every time I hear about Palantir, I suppose they were involved in the bombing of a wedding or of an EMT crew in a far away country, if they did not want to be associated with that, they can cut all their ties with the US wars on brown people, or publicly declare that they are just managing the meals and cleaning supplies.
